Helen of Troy

Helen was born from an egg, or so the story goes, because Zeus, the king of the gods who ruled from Mount Olympus, came to her mother Leda in the form of a great white swan. Leda was the queen of Sparta, a powerful city-state in the southern Peloponnese, and from that strange union came two children: Helen and her brother Polydeuces, the immortal twin who would later sail with the hero Jason on the quest for the Golden Fleece. Helen had a mortal sister as well, Clytemnestra, who would grow up to marry the great king Agamemnon of Mycenae, the wealthiest and most powerful ruler in all of Greece. From her earliest days, Helen was marked by beauty so extraordinary that even as a child she attracted the attention of the hero Theseus, who once kidnapped her with the help of his friend Pirithous, intending to keep her until she was old enough to marry. Her brothers, the twin warriors Castor and Polydeuces, rescued her and brought her back to Sparta, but the world had already seen what her face could provoke.

When Helen came of age, suitors arrived from every corner of the Greek world, kings and princes drawn by rumors of a face that outshone the dawn. Among them were Odysseus, the cunning king of Ithaca; Diomedes, the mighty warrior of Argos; Ajax the Greater, the towering shield-man of Salamis; and Menelaus, the brother of Agamemnon and heir to the throne of Sparta. Her foster-father Tyndareus, king of Sparta, feared that choosing one suitor would make enemies of all the rest, so the clever Odysseus proposed a solution: every suitor must swear a solemn oath to defend the chosen husband against any man who might take Helen by force. They all agreed, and Tyndareus gave Helen to Menelaus. The wedding was celebrated with feasting and sacrifice, and for a time Helen lived as queen of Sparta, mother to a daughter named Hermione. But the oath they had sworn would one day bind them all to war.

The trouble began at a wedding on Mount Ida, near the city of Troy in the far east. The goddess Eris, who personified strife and discord, had not been invited to the marriage of the hero Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis, and in revenge she tossed a golden apple inscribed "to the fairest" into the midst of the celebration. Three goddesses claimed it: Hera, the queen of Olympus and wife of Zeus; Athena, the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom and war; and Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. Zeus refused to judge between them and sent the three to a mortal shepherd, the Trojan prince Paris, who had been raised on Mount Ida after his parents abandoned him because of a prophecy that he would bring destruction to Troy. Each goddess offered Paris a bribe. Hera promised him power and empire. Athena promised him wisdom and victory in battle. Aphrodite promised him the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. Paris chose Aphrodite, and the judgment was sealed. He traveled to Sparta as a guest of Menelaus, and while the king was away on business, Paris persuaded Helen to leave with him. They sailed across the Aegean Sea to Troy, and behind them the oath of the suitors began to pull the Greek kings toward war.

For ten years the Greeks besieged Troy, their thousand ships drawn up on the beaches beneath the great walls, their armies camped in the dust and heat of the plain. The war consumed heroes on both sides: Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior, whose rage shaped the conflict; Hector, the noble Trojan prince who defended his city until he was slain by Achilles; and countless others whose names still echo through the centuries. Through it all, Helen lived in Troy as the wife of Paris, though some say she wept for her homeland and cursed the day she left Sparta. When Paris was killed by the archer Philoctetes, Helen married his brother Deiphobus, another prince of Troy, and continued to dwell within the doomed city. When the Greeks finally breached the walls through the trick of the wooden horse, the city burned. Menelaus found Helen in the wreckage and, according to some accounts, raised his sword to kill her, but her beauty disarmed him and he forgave her. Other accounts say she was nearly stoned by the Greek women but was saved by the goddess Aphrodite, who cloaked her in a mist of love and longing. In either case, Menelaus took her back to Sparta, and they lived together again as king and queen.

But there is another story, told by the poet Stesichorus and later by the tragedian Euripides, that Helen never went to Troy at all. In this version, the gods created a phantom Helen, an eidolon of cloud and light, and sent it to Troy with Paris while the real Helen was carried by Hermes to Egypt, where she waited out the war in the palace of the king Proteus, faithful and blameless. When Menelaus returned from Troy with the phantom, which dissolved into air, he sailed to Egypt and found his true wife waiting. This version absolves Helen of the destruction of Troy and makes her the victim of divine trickery rather than the architect of catastrophe. Whichever story is true, Helen's name became the measure of beauty in the ancient world. The poet Homer called her "the face that launched a thousand ships," and the playwright Christopher Marlowe, writing two thousand years later, echoed the same words. Her story has been painted, sung, and retold in every age, from the ancient Greek stage to the Hollywood screen, a reminder that desire, once awakened, can burn cities to the ground.